Shih Mei-yü (1 May 1873-30 December 1954), known as Mary Stone, was an American trained physician and Methodist medical missionary. She was best known for her work as superintendent of the Elizabeth Skelton Danforth Hospital at Kiukiang.

The parents of Shih Mei-yü were among the earliest and most devout Protestant converts in central China. Her father was for many years a minister of the Methodist church at Kiukiang, Kiangsi, and her mother was the principal of a day school for girls operated by the Methodist mission at Kiukiang. The young Shih Mei-yü thus was reared in an atmosphere of Christian piety and radically nonconformist attitudes toward certain traditional Chinese values. Her parents refused to bind her feet, for example, and she had the reputation of being among the first "bigfooted" girls in central China. She was tutored by her mother in the Chinese classics and in Christian literature. Her father, who had been impressed by the work of an American medical missionary, Dr. Kate Bushnell, further defied convention by deciding that his daughter should be trained for similar service. On Dr. Bushnell's advice that a basic grounding in the liberal arts should precede medical training, he enrolled Shih Mei-yü at the Rulison-Fish Memorial School, a mission school for girls at Kiukiang. She studied there for ten years under the guidance of Gertrude Howe, a Methodist missionary from Lansing, Michigan. On completing her middle school education in 1892, Shih Mei-yü went with Miss Howe to the United States to begin medical training. With them was K'ang Ch'eng (q.v.) who was later to win acclaim for her work as a pioneer Chinese woman doctor. In the United States, Shih Mei-yü adopted the name Mary Stone, and K'ang Ch'eng became Ida Kahn. Having passed entrance examinations in mathematics, rhetoric, history, physics, and Latin, the two girls were admitted to the medical school of the University of Michigan in the autumn of 1892. Upon graduation in June 1896, they became the first Chinese women to receive medical degrees from an American university. After spending the summer of 1896 in Chicago hospitals observing procedures and techniques, Dr. Stone received a commission as a medical missionary in China from the Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Church. Accompanied by Dr. Kahn, she returned to China that autumn as a representative of the society's Des Moines, Iowa, branch. The two young physicians set up practice at Kiukiang, where the suspicion with which the local inhabitants regarded them soon gave way to confidence. Dr. Stone later reported that during their first ten months at Kiukiang she and her associates treated more than 2,300 dispensary patients, made almost 300 house calls, and kept their one-room hospital filled.

Within two years the problem of inadequate facilities had been solved through the generosity of I. N. Danforth, a Chicago physician who had befriended Dr. Stone in the United States. He provided funds for the Elizabeth Skelton Danforth Hospital at Kiukiang, a memorial to his wife, equipped with 95 beds in wards and 15 rooms for private patients. Almost as soon as it was ready for occupancy, the new hospital had to be abandoned in the summer of 1900 because of the Boxer Uprising, which claimed Dr. Stone's father as a victim. Dr. Stone and Dr. Kahn took refuge in Japan. They returned to China in 1901 and formally opened the Danforth Memorial Hospital on 7 December, with Dr. Stone as superintendent.

Two years later, Dr. Kahn responded to an urgent appeal to establish a similar medical center in Nanchang, leaving Dr. Stone to administer the rapidly expanding Kiukiang hospital program alone. However, when Dr. Danfbrth offered Dr. Stone assistance in the form of an experienced and highly recommended American nurse to share the executive burdens, Dr. Stone graciously but firmly declined in order to demonstrate that Chinese women could become efficient administrators as well as competent medical practitioners. In 1907 Dr. Stone spent seven months in the United States undergoing surgery at the Wesleyan Hospital in Chicago under Dr. Danforth's supervision, resting and recuperating in the homes of friends throughout the country, and making appeals for support of the Danforth Memorial Hospital. Her success as a fundraiser enabled the hospital to expand its facilities considerably in the next few years. Demands on the Kiukiang facilities continued to increase as Dr. Stone's reputation as a physician and surgeon spread throughout central China. Records indicate that almost 3,000 patients a month were treated there in the busiest seasons, an increasingly large proportion of cases requiring "the largest operations known to surgery." After observing Dr. Stone's performance in the operating room, Dr. Danforth reported that "no Chicago surgeon is doing work superior to hers." In addition to administering the hospital and practicing medicine, Dr. Stone supervised the training of more than 500 Chinese nurses during her tenure of more than 20 years at Kiukiang. Because modern medicine was new to China, she had to prepare Chinese translations of textbooks and training materials for her nurses. Despite growing responsibilities at the Danforth Memorial Hospital, she also found time to supervise a home for cripples in Kiukiang. And she brought four adopted sons into her own home—two from families of relatives and two from destitute families. Dr. Stone spent the academic year 1918-19 doing postgraduate work at the medical school of The Johns Hopkins University on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, and she remained in the United States until June 1920. In an address to the Women's Foreign Missionary Society at Des Moines on 12 May 1920, she expressed her concern at the manner in which American brewers were "hurting China" by introducing foreign alcoholic beverages to her homeland. Dr. Stone also spoke on behalf of Chinese students in the United States, expressing her desire that Christian homes be opened to young Chinese so that they might receive the best that America had to offer. "I wonder," she said, "if they are left adrift here in your large cities to settle down with the foreign element there that is causing so much trouble in America today." Dr. Stone also expressed dismay that her younger sister, Dr. Phoebe Stone, had been denied the privileged status in American missionary circles that she herself enjoyed. Her sister, a graduate of Goucher College who had received her medical training at The Johns Hopkins University, took charge of the Danforth Memorial Hospital while Dr. Mary Stone was in the United States.

Because her sister was able to carry on the work in Kiangsi, Dr. Mary Stone, whose interests had never been confined solely to medicine, sought a new base of operations. Her increasingly literalist religious views led her, on her return to China from the United States, to sever ties with the Methodist Board of Missions and settle in Shanghai. She founded the Bethel Hospital and established the Bethel Mission in cooperation with Jennie V. Hughes, an American missionary. In the 1920-37 period, the Bethel nurses' training program was one of the best-known in China, drawing students from all parts of the country and graduating hundreds of trained nurses to assist in the expansion of modern medicine. The Bethel complex also included primary and secondary schools, an evangelical training department, and an orphanage. Dr. Stone herself conducted a Sunday morning Bible class with senior nurses and a Thursday evening Bible class with new students. Her aim was to have the young women accept Jesus Christ as their savior before leaving Bethel so that they would work as nurse evangelists. Miss Hughes and Dr. Stone brought up 36 Chinese children in their Shanghai home. Throughout this period, Dr. Stone was more prominent as a Christian evangelist than as a physician. She became the first woman to be ordained a Christian minister in central China, the first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in China, and a member of the China continuations committee of the National Missionary Conference. The Japanese attack on China in 1937 forced the Bethel Mission to move to Hong Kong. Dr. Stone worked indefatigably to gain support for its work. She spent much of her time in the United States, where the Bethel Mission headquarters was established in Pasadena, California. She was in Shanghai soon after the Japanese surrender, but she returned to Pasadena in her last years. She died in Pasadena on 30 December 1954, in her eighty-second year.